Obama Canvaser attacked

from WISN

CALEDONIA, Wis. -- Police in Caledonia are investigating the assault of a campaign volunteer as she was canvassing for Senator Barack Obama Saturday afternoon. In an exclusive interview with 12 News, 58 year-old Nancy Takehara of Chicago says she was going door-to-door when she came across a disgruntled homeowner. “The next thing I know he’s telling us we’re not his people, we’re probably with ACORN, and he started screaming and raving,” Takehara said. “He grabbed me by the back of the neck. I thought he was going to rip my hair out of my head. He was pounding on my head and screaming. The man terrified me.” The man eventually stopped and the Caledonia police were called. Takehara was asked if she needed medical assistance, but she was not seriously injured. Instead, she says she was shaken up by the homeowner’s reaction.

--snip--

The reference to ACORN in this account is important. No doubt the irate homeowner came up with that obscure organization's name thanks to far right wing propaganda that has been showered on the American public for the last three or four weeks. The reference to ACORN is no accident, in other words, but part of a sustained Republican voter suppression effort. In fact, scratch the surface a little bit and you begin to realize that the whole Republican gambit against ACORN is tied directly to the US Attorney scandal under Alberto Gonzales. How so? Well recall that in the US attorneys scandal several US attorneys were fired for their unwillingess to pursue politically charged cases, including voter fraud, with sufficient aggression to satisfy the Bush administration.

According to TalkingPointsMemo

House Judiciary chair John Conyers, as well as David Iglesias -- whose firing as US attorney was a direct result of his reluctance to pursue GOP-pushed claims of voter fraud, according to the recent OIG report -- have also connected the FBI's ACORN investigation to the kind of politicization exposed in the firings saga.

The smearing of ACORN is an essential part of McCain voter suppression strategy. By alleging that ACORN voter fraud could threaten the fabric of our democracy, as McCain claimed in the debate Wednesday night, he is trying to create a much greater doubt about the electoral process altogether. Couple that with an imprudent --and possibly illegal FBI investigation this close to a national election --and you create a volatile atmosphere for low information voters who don't realize the demonization of ACORN is all about throwing out as many voter registrations as possible. That's the Republican's end goal, presumably. Perhaps a tangential benefit is calling into question Obama's mandate, should he win. Neither are helpful to the Democratic process or dignified, frankly. And, certainly in this instance, ACORN is very much a victim of a GOP smear campaign.

A word or two about ACORN

ACORN has been around for 38 years. It's an acronym that stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now and it's been active all these years at the community level in fighting for fair wage laws, preventing home owner discrimination and predatory lending and voter registration. What problems there are with voter registration forms are noted AND handed into the precincts. Why? Because in many localities that's the law. It's required they hand in all registrations. Voluntarily, ACORN flags those registrations that appear suspicious, but it's up to local officials to determine the validity of the voter registration--NOT ACORN. As King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, a Republican, said last year the ACORN case in Seattle had nothing to do with manipulating outcomes and everything to do with the workers' efforts to keep their $8-an-hour jobs. If anyone was defrauded, it was ACORN... "The defendants ... cheated their employers to get paid for work they did not actually perform," Satterberg said. "The defendants simply realized that making up names was easier than actually canvassing the streets."

Do fake registrations equal fake ballots? No

To give some sense of how infrequently an actual voter registration problem leads to a miscaste ballot, Dr Lori Minnite of Barnard College has reported that from 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once. That’s 26 criminal voters -- voters who vote twice, impersonate other people, vote without being a resident -- the voters that Republicans warn about. 26 out of the millions and millions of ballots caste in those three years. Think about those numbers...your odds on the lottery are better than coming across an incidence of true voter fraud. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of people are getting turned away at the polls.

"Yet", Minnite notes, "we see the repetition of wildly exaggerated allegations about ACORN's "criminality" by people like Michelle Malkin, a right-wing blogger; John Fund, who's been attacking ACORN for years from his vantage as a Wall Street Journal columnist; and Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative so devoted to Nixonian dirty tricks that he's tattooed an image of Nixon's face on his back. His blog, by the way, is sponsored by the same law firm that launched a phony voter fraud attack on ACORN in Florida during the last presidential election."

"Let’s remember, as the Republicans make a furor over the Indiana registrations, that ACORN itself separated out those registrations -- found the 2,000 faulty ones and flagged them for election officials -- in the first place. "

Let's repeat that: they work with elected officials, not against them.

If you are unfortunate enough to have any, let your Republican friends or family members know that the nonsense the GOP is spewing lately is not merely lies and smears, which, afterall, we have come to expect. But when coupled with the 'terrorist' association nonsense and the nativist racism already prevalent in many American communities, these smears create a toxic environment that is dangerous, incendiary and hate filled. Innocent people will get hurt because of it.

That's not just ACORNs' problem, or Obama's. It's every Republicans' problem who has not spoken out against such ugly tactics used in their name. From history, we know how tragically such cowardly silence can end.

Below is short Hidden History on ACORN.

~DM





P.S. If you are still deeply concerned about election fraud in America, you might try reading this story about a fellow named Mark Jacoby, who was arrested in Ontario and owns a firm hired in California that explicitly violated state registration laws by illegally switching party identification. This is the real deal, afterall. But it will not please the likes of FOX News or The Wall Street Journal: Mark Jacoby was hired by the Californian Republican party. ...

"Jacoby's arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department comes after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by his firm, Young Political Majors, or YPM. The voters said YPM tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters. The firm was paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP."